Author: Kevin Latham
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 185109587X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
This exciting title in ABC-CLIO's Popular Culture in the Contemporary World series offers the nonspecialist reader the only up-to-date introduction to all facets of popular culture in China. China's release from Maoist austerity has produced an explosion in popular culture. The Chinese have embraced such technologies as television and cell phones and shaped them to their own social context. Understanding modern China requires a thorough knowledge of daily life there. This book presents readers, from high-school and college students to the inquisitive tourist, with that knowledge. The author, a scholar of Chinese culture, draws on his own fieldwork, along with authoritative scholarship and reporting, to give the reader a comprehensive, lively, and accessible introduction to all aspects of Chinese popular culture. The book begins with an introduction to understanding popular culture in China and covers mass media; print media; cinema, film, and video; the Internet; and also discusses the rise of consumption and consumerism. From the modernization of traditional theater to the traditional uses of modern technology, this book presents a guide to the emerging culture of a country that will inevitably become increasingly influential in coming years.

Author: Jianying Zha
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 159558756X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
China Pop is a highly original and lively look at the ways that contemporary China is changing by Jianying Zha, a critic hailed in The Nation as "incisive, witty and eloquent all at once--a sort of female, Chinese Jonathan Spence." From her constant contact (and, in many cases, friendships) with a dynamic group of young novelists, filmmakers, and artists in China, Zha examines a wide range of developments largely unknown to Western readers: the careful planning of television soap operas to placate popular unrest after Tianamen, the growth of the sex tabloid and pornographic industries, the new generation of entrepreneurs successfully bringing to the mainland techniques of Hong Kong and the West, and the politics behind the censorship and commercial success of the film director Chen Kaige (Farewell My Concubine) and Zhang Yimou (Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern). Praise for China Pop: "One of the twenty-five best books of 1995." —Voice Literary Supplement "[A] photographic, a freeze-frame, of a country in rapid motion... [Zha is] a young writer with many arresting ideas and, from the evidence of China Pop, a bright literary future as well." —New York Times "Perceptive... What China Pop so brilliantly chronicles is the commercialization of China's cultural world and the anxiety that change is causing in China's intellectuals." —Christian Science Monitor "By far the best book on Chinese urban culture after the 1989 Beijing massacre. [Zha] brilliantly combines the eye for detail of an insider with the detached perspective of an outsider. Her lively and graceful style make the book as enjoyable as it is edifying." —Perry Link, author of Evening Chats in Beijing "An absorbing and revealing book. With the familiarity of an insider and the ability of an outsider to step back and reflect, Zha... captures the fundamental paradoxes lying at the root of this mutant 'people's republic' in the throes of reform." —Orville Schell, author of Mandate of Heaven

Author: Carlos Rojas
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134032234
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Through analyses of a wide range of Chinese literary and visual texts from the beginning of the twentieth century through the contemporary period, the thirteen essays in this volume challenge the view that canonical and popular culture are self-evident and diametrically opposed categories, and instead argue that the two cultural sensibilities are inextricably bound up with one another. An international line up of contributors present detailed analyses of literary works and other cultural products that have previously been neglected by scholars, while also examining more familiar authors and works from provocative new angles.The essays include investigations into the cultural industries and contexts that produce the canonical and popular, the position of contemporary popular works at the interstices of nostalgia and amnesia, and also the ways in which cultural texts are inflected with gendered and erotic sensibilities while at the same time also functioning as objects of desire in its own right. As the only volume of its kind to cover the entire span of the 20th century, and also to consider the interplay of popular and canonical literature in modern China with comparable rigor, Rethinking Chinese Popular Culture is an important resource for students and scholars of Chinese literature and culture.

Author: Chang-tai Hung
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520354869
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Book Description
This is the first comprehensive study of popular culture in twentieth-century China, and of its political impact during the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945 (known in China as "The War of Resistance against Japan"). Chang-tai Hung shows in compelling detail how Chinese resisters used a variety of popular cultural forms—especially dramas, cartoons, and newspapers—to reach out to the rural audience and galvanize support for the war cause. While the Nationalists used popular culture as a patriotic tool, the Communists refashioned it into a socialist propaganda instrument, creating lively symbols of peasant heroes and joyful images of village life under their rule. In the end, Hung argues, the Communists' use of popular culture contributed to their victory in revolution.

Author: Perry Link
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 1461641055
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
Using ingenious research methods, the contributors to this book explore the search for meaning among ordinary people in China today. The subjects of these vivid essays span the social spectrum from hip young entrepreneurs to sweatshop workers and homeless beggars. The issues are equally diverse, ranging from domestic violence to homosexuality to political corruption. The culture of popular China emerges as a mixture of exhilarating new aspirations—as seen in the basketball fans who dream of "flying" like Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant; rueful cynicism—as bitingly conveyed in the many satirical jingles that circulate by word of mouth; and painful ambivalence. The people depicted here have built their popular culture out of ideas and symbolic practices drawn from old cultural traditions, from concepts about modernity debated during the early twentieth-century republican era, from the legacies of Maoist socialism, and from contemporary global culture. Throughout, the book shows how economic and social changes caused by globalization, in combination with the continuing Party dictatorship, have presented ordinary Chinese with a new array of moral and cultural challenges that they have met in ways that have changed the face of China. Contributions by: Julia F. Andrews, Anita Chan, Deborah S. Davis, Leila Fernández-Stembridge, Robert Geyer, Amy Hanser, Richard Levy, Perry Link, Richard P. Madsen, Andrew Morris, Paul G. Pickowicz, Kuiyi Shen, Liping Wang, Li Zhang, Yuezhi Zhao, and Kate Zhou. ,

Author: Lu Chen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315414716
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
How can Japanese popular culture gain numerous fans in China, despite pervasive anti-Japanese sentiment? How is it that there’s such a strong anti-Korean sentiment in Chinese online fan communities when the official Sino-Korean relationship is quite stable before 2016? Avid fans in China are raising hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding to make gifts to their idols in foreign countries. Tabloid reports on Japanese and Korean celebrities have been known to trigger nationalist protests in China. So, what is the relationship between Chinese fandom of Japanese and Korean popular culture and nationalist sentiment among Chinese youth? Chen discusses how Chinese fans of Japanese and Korean popular culture have formed their own nationalistic discourse since the 1990s. She argues that, as nationalism is constructed from various entangled ideologies, narratives, myths and collective memories, popular culture simply becomes another resource for the construction of nationalism. Fans thus actively select, interpret and reproduce the content of cultural products to suit their own ends. Unlike existing works, which focus on the content of transnational cultural flows in East Asia, this book focuses on the reception and interpretation of the Chinese audience.

Author: Beng Huat Chua
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
ISBN: 9888139037
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
East Asian pop culture can be seen as an integrated cultural economy emerging from the rise of Japanese and Korean pop culture as an influential force in the distribution and reception networks of Chinese language pop culture embedded in the ethnic Chinese diaspora. Taking Singapore as a locus of pan-Asian Chineseness, Chua Beng Huat provides detailed analysis of the fragmented reception process of transcultural audiences and the processes of audiences’ formation and exercise of consumer power and engagement with national politics. In an era where exercise of military power is increasingly restrained, pop culture has become an important component of soft power diplomacy and transcultural collaborations in a region that is still haunted by colonization and violence. The author notes that the aspirations behind national governments' efforts to use popular culture is limited by the fragmented nature of audiences who respond differently to the same products; by the danger of backlash from other members of the importing country's population that do not consume the popular culture products in question; and by the efforts of the primary consuming country, the People's Republic of China to shape products through co-production strategies and other indirect modes of intervention.

Author: Kwai-Cheung Lo
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9789622097537
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Jackie Chan's high-flying stunts, giant pandas, and even the unintentionally hilarious English subtitles that often accompany Hong Kong's films are among the many targets of Kwai-Cheung Lo's in-depth study of Hong Kong popular culture. Drawing on current

Author: Perry Link
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000009777
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
This book presents a view of social life in China and discusses different methods for studying contemporary China as a tool for introducing students to the study of popular culture. Through a diverse set of case studies, it introduces readers to a wide range of issues facing Chinese society.

Author: David Johnson
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520357086
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Book Description
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1985.